Ferment in the Firmament

Rumination on the blogosphere brought back a vivid, formative memory for me this morning.

Several years ago, when I was attending the Society for Neuroscience conference at which I proposed to my wife, the rather prosaic task of traversing a catwalk led to an epiphany that is changing the course of my life.

Some background is in order for the vast majority of those who may happen by. First, the particular conference I attended is HUGE and has thousands of participants from all over the world. It lasts about a week. Each day features a heavy schedule of seminars (most kept to less than 30 minutes for lack of time, and tens of them occur at once) and far more numerous poster sessions. The most exciting and cutting-edge results get the lecture slots and everything else is presented in poster form. The idea of a conference is that you present your results to other scientists with similar interests and they tell you about their work in turn. Collaborations, new insights, friendships and job offers can be born this way.

"Whoa, Gus! What's a 'poster session'?" you might be asking -- or you should, because it turns out to be important. In a poster session, you present graphs, diagrams, and (if you use imaging in your work) pictures with explanatory text. This is not something you can just slap together in a few hours and not expect to look like an idiot. Posters take loads of work. You have to figure out which data most effectively illustrate your findings to date. You have to describe the scientific basis of your work in enough detail that other scientists will see its context, but sparsely enough to keep from confusing someone who has only a few minutes to look at the poster. You will then need to be present for an appointed time for about two hours to answer any questions that the other scientists might have. Invariably, you end up having to do a fair bit of extra reading because you uncover some point you haven't thought of for awhile, but know will come up. And you can't just hope some heavy hitter who really knows his stuff won't show up: a summary of your work (an "abstract") has been sent to all other attendees ahead of time. If someone cares about your area of expertise enough, they will show up and they will have had plenty of time to think of questions. The gist of all this is that a poster takes a ton of work to put together, and that this 3-by-5 foot poster is itself a summary of months of grueling lab work and analysis. If you present a poster, you have poured a not insignificant part of your life into it.

So now you know what a poster is. This particular conference was held in the cavernous Morial Convention Center in fabulous New Orleans, my wife's home town. One afternoon, I was on the second floor looking for the auditorium where a lecture I wanted to see was going to be. I was lost for a bit, but got my bearings and realized that the auditorium was on the other side of the building. No problem! I'll just take the catwalk.

Remember, there are perhaps dozens of lectures about to start simultaneously, and the results they describe are the cream of the crop. At the same time, there will be hundreds of poster sessions on the first floor. When I crossed the catwalk, I was jarred by what I saw and realized. In both directions, as far as I could see, were rows and rows of posters. I could have been one of the stalks in this corn field. I was awed. This represented an incredible amount of work! At the same time, what I did seemed insignificant. This really bothered me until I'd had a chance to think more about it.

What is significance, anyway? I am not talking about the technical jargon of statistics. What makes something important? In the thick of a scientific project, you can easily work 80 hour weeks if you're not careful. And then you'll go to a meeting to present a poster? And then what? Become a cornstalk in a vast field? Well, no. There is the scientific merit of a research project. Today's poster that has four visitors can conceivably be the beginning of the next big breakthrough. But even if it is not, some scientific question is probably being answered, so in that respect, it has merit. But we live in a huge universe and our whole world is but a speck of dust within. A look for meaning from without is quixotic at best and maddening at worst.

Remember how I phrased the demands of a scientific project earlier? "[Y]ou can easily work 80 hour weeks if you're not careful." Not careful? If what you are doing is personally important to you, you will not mind those 80 hour weeks, because you are truly living your life. And there won't be a "cornstalk factor" for you, because your sense of accomplishment will trump any concern for what the other guy is doing. But if you are not living your life for your own satisfaction, you're irretrievably losing it one precious hour at a time, and you might just as well be a cornstalk. That epiphany started me on a long, halting path of realization: that I do not really enjoy being a scientist. With the amount of effort I have put into becoming a scientist, you might see why it took me so long to figure that out. It's hard to face the fact that you've blown a decade of your work life. And then there's the matter of what to do instead. And frankly the fact that you goofed up a major life decision doesn't exactly help you trust yourself to get it right "next time."

So now we come full circle to my starting point. I am new to blogging and see that there is an enormous number of fellow bloggers out there. Quite a few of these are famous. Some are even household names! I'll have to work pretty hard to rise above the ranks of the amateurs. I'm back on that catwalk again. I wonder if what I say will make a difference to anyone out there. Maybe it will and maybe it won't, but I'm enjoying this, so I'll do it anyway. I don't know whether blogging will lead to a writing career, or even to a satisfying hobby, but I'm going to explore it and enjoy the ride. Maybe I have found a better approach to the question of how to spend my life. Perhaps there is some hope I'll finally get things right.

In any event, the blogosphere is the equivalent, in our age, of the coffee house of Revolutionary times; the blogger of the pamphleteer. There's a great intellectual discourse going on out there and I don't intend to worry too much about whether I'm the loudest voice. But I want to take part in the ferment that is taking place in the vast reaches of that firmament that is the blogosphere.

-- CAV